Competition for the hackNY Fellows Program is fierce, with only 19 students chosen in 2018 from a pool of several hundred. This year, undergraduate students Martha Edwards and Kalvin Lam of Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) were selected. They join Fellows from previous years that include Valentin Perez ‘18, Jason Gorelick ‘12, and Alexandra Berke ‘13. The program was co-founded in 2010 by Brown alum Hilary Mason, who is now the general manager for machine learning at Cloudera. Since 2010, hackNY has partnered with over 100 host startups to host over 200 hackNY Fellows.

The fellowship, which takes place this summer from May 28 to August 3, is comprised of a ten-week work experience at a New York City startup (participating companies span the industry and the alphabet from Buzzfeed to Tumblr) as well as supplemental events and programming led by CEOs and executives from hackNY portfolio companies and hackNY-affiliated organizations. Fellows also use their skills to assist nonprofits in social good projects, from mental health technology to tech education to interactive art installations, working to build the tools needed to give back to New York City.

Despite the program's title, hackNY is open to outstanding students in computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, and other fields related to software development: Martha and Kalvin are both computer science concentrators. This summer, Kalvin’s hackNY work experience is at Babbel, an ed tech software company focused on language learning, while Martha is at Celmatix, a biotech women’s health startup.